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Overview
Pete Wilkinson, one time Director of Greenpeace UK and leading environmental campaigner, is the Warrior of the title. He largely created the crusade that brought Green issues to the minds of the nation - and the world - through a series of imaginative demonstrations and direct actions with Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. This book is a personalised history of the development of environmental activism, but it does not confine itself to the glorification of the achievements of the major forces within the Green Lobby. The dramatic action of those early campaigns is here, but so is a revealing warts-and-all inside look at Greenpeace - its origins, its early history and current dilemmas. This is compulsive reading, exposing the politics and power-struggles within the environmental movement, and cutting through the red tape and bureaucracy that beset the Green movement today. The author brings to life the eye-catching campaigns that characterised the early days of Greenpeace: dressing up as giant plastic bottles; climbing the tower of Big Ben; dumping radioactive mud outside the Department of the Environment. All these stories are conveyed with humour and incisive (sometimes biting) wit. In powerful prose, the author carries us over the oceans to Antarctica, to marvel at this most beautiful and little-known continent - a region which has become a veritable dump for the rubbish left by explorers and generated by the permanent bases there. The drama and excitement of the battles between Greenpeace vessels and Japanese whaling ships is conveyed here, in a way that makes Warrior as involving as it is informative. Warrior is essentially a personal account of a life spent within a movement which represents the outstanding preoccupation - and perhaps the most important impulse for survival - of our era.Synopsis
A fascinating insight into the organisation of the Green movement from its infancy in the 1970s up to the present day. Pete Wilkinson was the Director of Greenpeace in its heyday and leader of its Atlantic expeditions.
Publishers Weekly
When Greenpeace was recruiting in England in the mid-'70s, the organization wanted the "most ornery sonofabitch" available, according to Wilkinson, who fulfilled the requirement, eventually becoming director of Greenpeace UK. With freelance writer Schofield, he here recounts those heady years of challenge and confrontation. There was the battle to stop Britain from dumping nuclear waste into the sea; raids against whaling ships; monitoring military bases in Antarctica. Wilkinson gives a frank assessment of Greenpeace's exploits; he discusses the internal conflicts and personal problems. By the early '90s, he felt that the organization had lost direction, a victim of its own success. Wilkinson resigned to become an environmental consultant. Good adventure and an instructive look at Greenpeace's formative years. Photos. (Nov.)